Marin actors put on an original play about the prosecution of "the American Taliban" to sold out crowds.

Small theater notwithstanding, this may be a sign that theater may again become a forum for exploring political and philisophical issues.

The main stars of Grease and the Pink Ladies' pajama party scene were featured last night on local cable access TV, with director Staci Johnson setting the tone.

Matt Monaco (Danny), Colleen Sullivan (Sandy) and Tyler Brand (Kenickie) shared the talk chairs with Johnson as she explained what Grease was to the audience.

Monaco and Sullivan are both 19 and students at Yuba Community College. Brand is 15 and a student Yuba City High School.

Monaco played an outstanding Lucky in the recent college production of Waiting for Godot. Sullivan previously has undertaken the wildly dissimilar tasks of playing Wendy in Peter Pan and a femme fatale in a community Halloween production of Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Brand, who has a strong baritone/bass voice and knack for acting, has played in among other things, Tom Sawyer.

After the usual pitch for coming to see the show and the announcements about where to get tickets.

Engineers cut t the adjacent set where it was 1959 and the four Pink Ladies were having a typical sleepover and Marty's house. Clad in satiny jammies and robes, the quartet sang "Freddy My Love" with the Sara Guerrero (Marty) leading, and Mary Cobb (Frenchy), Sharon Doscher (Jan) and Dahni Trujillo (Rizzo) backing her..

The group has fine-tuned their singing and choreography for the number during rehearsals at the Packard Library. There they have I perfected. In the television studio with the mikes not exactly well positioned, they sometimes sang over each other, but the whole thing worked well nonetheless.

"The set was so small," Doscher said the next day after rehearsal.